Around that time, I only first heard about commercial Lisp systems from Franz (VAX), HP (their own minicomputers), and Symbolics. It was around 1988 when I first saw a Lisp Machine, at a defense contractor (SAIC), after they showed me how defense spending under Pres. Reagan was in the exponential knee of increase. But the fad seemed to be hugely focused on VAX/VMS, not Lisp.

Over in the commercial realm, the fad seemed to be with TRS-80, Atari, Mac (?), definitely IBM/PC’s, Pascal, then Object Pascal. Even C wasn’t getting much traction, and C++ was just a gleam in the envious C community’s eyes - largely a preprocessor of some sort. Smalltalk was a fascinating curiosity, and only tinkerers were playing with it.

- DM


On Apr 19, 2017, at 05:56, David McClain <dbm@refined-audiometrics.com> wrote:


On Apr 19, 2017, at 05:42, Joachim Durchholz <jo@durchholz.org> wrote:

Yeah, I was assuming that macros are global.
It's very old Lisp experience from the days when Common Lisp and Scheme were new fads, when Lisp machines were still a thing, and had to be rebooted on a daily basis to keep them running.

Was Lisp ever a fad? I’m shocked to hear that. Seriously!

I only got into Lisp after several years of mild nagging by one of my former employees, who studied Lisp and Proof Systems for his graduate CS Degree from U.Oregon, sometime back in the early 80’s, late 70’s. Turns out everything he said was true, and more.

- DM
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